In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Camilla A. Hawthorne. Hawthorne is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. Her book is Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Camilla A. Hawthorne: Contesting Race and Citizenship traces one of the most prominent citizenship mobilizations unfolding in Europe today—the movement to reform Italian nationality law. Italy has among the most restrictive citizenship laws in Europe. Italian nationality is conferred on the basis of jus sanguinis (right of blood), which has left unrecognized and disenfranchised as many as nine hundred thousand children of immigrants who were born and raised in Italy. My book asks why and how so many Black Italians (the children of African and Afro-Latinx immigrants) have adopted national citizenship as a privileged terrain of struggle over racial justice, inclusion, and belonging. I argue that citizenship—and specifically, the long-standing debate about the legal inclusion of Black subjects within European polities—is key to understanding the connection between subtler, late-twentieth-century “color-blind” or “cultural” racisms and the resurgence of overt racial nationalisms during the last decade. After all, in the wake of World War II—after the horrors of Fascism and subsequent international campaigns challenging the “myth” of race—racism and racial nationalism did not simply disappear. Instead, they were re-embedded within the seemingly race-neutral apparatus of national citizenship. National citizenship is thus a powerful, yet often overlooked, crucible within which racisms are being reproduced and reconfigured, new racial distinctions are articulated, and the constitutive exclusions of liberalism are laid bare. As such, Contesting Race and Citizenship asks questions that are critical for our current political moment: Is it possible to mobilize for rights and recognition without reproducing the racial state? Can activism that engages with the racial state’s language of citizenship radically reformulate that category from within, or does this only preclude the articulation of broader political solidarities? My book endeavors to show how Black Italian mobilizations exhume long-buried links between the bureaucratic apparatus of liberal citizenship and racism, a connection that has paved the way for the explosion of far-right, neofascist, populist politics across Europe and much of the rest of the world.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
I believe that we are in a time of incredible possibility. This may seem a naïve assessment, an optimism of the will in the face of deep pessimism of the intellect, in a conjuncture characterized by a global resurgence of racist nationalism, the brutal fortification of borders, and the intensification of economic inequality and precarization. This decade is often referred to as a crisis, or a Gramscian interregnum—one in which an existing social formation is crumbling but a new one still has yet to take shape. Yet abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues, drawing on the great British-Jamaican theorist Stuart Hall, “Crisis is not objectively bad or good; rather it signals systemic change whose outcome is determined through a struggle.” In other words, the outcome of this moment of global crisis is neither fixed nor predetermined; we have the opportunity to prefigure a better world out of the ashes of the old, through collective struggle. And in that sense, I believe that what is happening in Italy has far-reaching implications for activists and organizers. Black Italian struggles for racial justice are crucial for understanding how to resist the forces of racial-capitalist-nationalism that are shaping our world today, underscoring the necessity of forging of interconnections among diverse struggles for justice. Because most Black Italians are also postcolonial subjects who have intergenerational experiences with border violence and exploitative labor regimes, their mobilizations necessarily link together struggles against racism, borders, coloniality, and capitalism. Any movement for substantive racial justice must also contend with, and seek to dismantle, the deadly entanglements of racial capitalism, border fortification, and coloniality.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
I hope that after engaging with my book, readers will unlearn singular, totalizing, or universalizing logics for theorizing the politics of Blackness on a global scale and begin to decenter North America in the study of global Blackness. The Black Mediterranean is not just a defunct precondition for a racial capitalist order centered on the North Atlantic, nor is it merely derivative of Black Atlantic afterlives of slavery. To give one example: when Black Lives Matter protests erupted cross the world in the summer of 2020, many commentators (particularly those based in the United States) remarked that the movement had “gone global.” But we should be careful about assuming that Black Lives Matter simply emanated outward from the United States in a sort of linear, transnational diffusion of diasporic resources—a perspective that implicitly, and mistakenly, assumes that Black Italians did not (or could not) reach proper Black political consciousness until they were given direction by Black Americans. While the diasporic circulation of culture, ideas, and political strategies has undoubtedly shaped the politicization of Black Italians, it is also the case that there have been many generations of Black struggle across Italy and the Black Mediterranean, including resistance to Italian colonialism in Africa. Rather than rehearse diffusionist narratives of Black diasporic politics, my work argues that we should shift our focus to understand Black Lives Matter itself as a diasporic resource that is shared back and forth across different diasporic sites—and specifically, in this case, across the Black Atlantic and Black Mediterranean. I see Black Lives Matter as a diasporic resource that unfolds relationally as it settles in diverse geographic contexts, and whose political and ethical demands are constantly being transformed and expanded in the process. Conversations about what it means to make Black lives matter in Italy have focused on citizenship as a racial-gendered formation tied to specific histories of Italo-Mediterranean racial formation; activists have also argued that Black Lives Matter in Italy must necessarily extend beyond the so-called ‘second-generation’ to include Black refugees and migrants, who face the violence of EU border regimes, racialized neglect in detention centers, and horrific labor exploitation in Italian agricultural camps. These specific entanglements of racism, citizenship, borders, and colonialism are key to understanding the politics of racism and race in Black Italy and the Black Mediterranean, and they also offer important lessons for abolitionist struggles as they are unfolding elsewhere across the global Black diaspora.
Which intellectuals and/or intellectual movements most inspire your work?
The growing field of Black Geographies has profoundly shaped my work—it has given me the conceptual tools to think not only about the spatial dynamics of anti-Black racism, but also about the inherent spatialities of Black life, imagination, and resistance. I also draw inspiration from abolitionist scholarship and activism—especially as they increasingly articulate connections between struggles against policing and prisons in North America and struggles against the deadly border regimes of Fortress Europe. Angela Y. Davis, for instance, famously argued that the carcerality of EU border regimes and immigrant detention structures is intertwined with the expansion of the prison industrial complex in the United States and the infrastructures of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine. Additionally, I have learned a great deal from the long tradition of radical Black Caribbeanist thought—C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Stuart Hall, Édouard Glissant, Jamaica Kincaid, Françoise Vergès, and many others. The Caribbean, and its relationship to the Black Radical Tradition, helps us “provincialize” linear, diffusionist stories of European capitalist modernity by reorienting world history on the islands of the Caribbean. As C.L.R. James wrote in the 1963 appendix to The Black Jacobins, the brutal, racial political economy based on the transnational sugar trade thrust enslaved Black folk into “a life that was in its essence a modern life.” Caribbean intellectuals have also grappled with what J. Michael Dash calls the “composite reality” of Caribbean societies—the ways that diverse groups, languages, religions, and cultural practices have come together under conditions of extreme exploitation and dispossession to collectively generate new, durable forms of life. This work has prompted me to ask what might happen when we begin to approach the Mediterranean Sea (like the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean) as one of many rhizomatic starting points for telling different kinds of stories about modernity, racial capitalism, and even Blackness itself.
Which two books published in the last five years would you recommend to BAR readers? How do you envision engaging these titles in your future work?
It is a near-impossible task to narrow it down to just two books, but if pressed I would say Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Elite Capture: How The Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) (Pluto Press, 2022) and Olivette Otele’s Black Europeans: An Untold History (Hurst Publishers, 2022). Both of these books provide us with valuable tools for responding to the interlocking challenges of our current political moment. Táíwò’s book represents a critical and urgently-needed intervention that helps us understand how the Black, queer, socialist-feminist identity politics of the Combahee River Collective have been co-opted by powerful economic and political interests in ways that ultimately thwart the elaboration of broad, solidaristic politics that trouble and work across—rather than reify—categories of difference. And Otele’s book powerfully demonstrates that re-centering the complexities of Blackness and Black life in the story of Euro-Mediterranean modernity is not reducible to a mere liberal politics of inclusion and representation; rather, it can work to can work to undermine the dangerous pretentions of European ethnic absolutism and racial nationalism that lie at the heart of the current neofascist resurgence. Both of these books shape my thinking as I begin my next project, which considers the connections between Black liberation struggles in the United States focused on policing and prisons, and Black liberation struggles in Italy focused on access to citizenship and the dismantling of deadly border fortification. My hope is to craft an interconnected, global story in which the Black Mediterranean and Atlantic diasporas are connected by technologies of displacement and confinement as well as abolitionist strategies of resistance and world-building.
Roberto Sirvent is editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.